Re: Config: DB or git?

12-factor is all the rage, and they have some very good ideas that ought to be followed.  But insisting that environment variables are the only correct way of storing settings, is, well, just plain wrong. [ Note: I have 40 years of experience, I recognize a fad when I see it. ] All of those values have to get _into_ the environment variables somehow, and that means that somewhere there is a disk file which has them in it.  Is it really safer to have them written in some language other than Python so that you have to have a special program to read them?  I doubt it.

So my preference is to use a structured settings arrangement, where the file which is referenced by DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE imports settings.py (not vice-verso). 
That outside settings module, called salt_settings.py on my systems, is written by the SaltStack "state" which deploys my server.
The same "state" also creates the database, the nginx configulation, and the uWSGI configuration, so the same passwords, sockets, database names, etc, are used on both sides of an interface.
The sensitive data, such as passwords, are kept in a Salt Pillar structure, which is in a (highly protected) repo, separate from the salt "state" files, which are in a separate repo from the application.  Three purposes, three repos.

Why SaltStack and not one of the other configuration engines mentioned above?  Because Salt, like django, is written using a Python templating system.  You do not program your configuration in Ruby (Puppet and Chef) or Python (fabric), but lay it out in nice, readable, white-space sensitive YAML files, with Jinja templates where needed.
I have an over-simplified example at https://github.com/eHealthAfrica/salt_demo
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Venon Cole

On Monday, September 29, 2014 2:05:37 PM UTC+1, guettli wrote:

Hi,

of course we separate data from code:

  - code belongs into version control (git)
  - data belongs into a database (postgres)

But where does configuration belong?

Since I am a developer I like version control.

But the longer I think about this question, I think
the perfect configuration for an app just contains
one entry: How to connect to the DB.

Sooner or later you want things to editable via an admin interface.

And if you look at big systems like SAP. There is only very little config in files.

I think config should be done in the database, not files. It is hard to accept
this, since version control is great for files, and not so good for databases,
but I think it is the way to go.

What do you think?

   Thomas



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Thomas Güttler
http://thomas-guettler.de/

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